2.9 “Croatoan”
Sam has another of his visions, in which he sees Dean advance on a young guy and shoot him, saying “It's in him”. What this means --- whether the guy is supposed to be possessed or not --- Sam doesn't know but on waking he rouses his brother and they head to the location of his dream, Rivergrove in Oregon. On arriving there they ask a man whom had been in Sam's vision, a tough military type called Mark, if he knows of anyone with, as Sam has seen, a scar on his forehead. After some initial suspicion and reluctance Mark says Duane Tanner has a similar scar, and directs them to his house. On a telegraph pole Sam notices the word “Croatoan” carved into it. He's interested: he remembers the story of Roanoke, the earliest colony to settle America. One night they all just vanished without trace or explanation, and that word was carved into a tree. This does not bode well.
They decide to ring the Roadhouse for help but can't get a signal. In fact, there seems to be no phone service at all. Concerned, they continue on towards Tanner's house where they are fobbed off by Duane's brother Jake and his father, but go back and look in the window to see the wife tied to a chair and the son cutting his arm, about to drop the blood on her and telling her it won't hurt. They break in, shoot the father but the son gets away, Sam wasting the chance to cut him down, and he disappears into the woods. The boys rescue the mother, take her to the hospital. There Sam meets more people from his vision, and stays with the doctor while Dean tries to make it to the next town to get help. On the way he runs into another dead body in a car, with a knife nearby, then a roadblock in which Jake is involved.
Back at the hospital the doctor examines the late Mr. Turner's blood and sees that he was fighting off some sort of unknown virus, but there is a weird residue in the blood that the doctor swears is sulphur. Sam nods to himself. Dean gets away from the men in the roadblock, barely, then runs into Mark on his way back into town. Mark tells him that he has had to shoot his neighbour, who came at him with an axe. They head back to the hospital, where Mrs Turner suddenly goes psycho, easily tossing Sam into a glass cabinet and yelling, grabbing a scalpel. Sam manages to knock her out with a fire extinguisher.
Sam tells Dean he has been checking their father's journal, and thinks he knows what is happening. The virus is of demonic origin: the more people who get infected with it the more get turned. It spreads by blood contact, and he thinks, as his father did, that Croatoan is the name of a demon of plague and pestilence. Seeing Mrs Turner is infected, the brothers have no choice and Dean shoots her. Duane turns up, a cut in his leg. He says he was on a fishing trip but saw what was happening and ran. Dean and Sam, the doctor and nurse and Mark all worry that he might be infected, and Dean goes to shoot him, as in Sam's vision, but finds that since they can't be sure Duane is infected he can't do it. As they prepare bombs from the medical supplies, the nurse suddenly turns and attacks Sam, getting him infected too. Dean stares open-mouthed: his brother is now about to turn in a few hours. An even harder decision awaits him than the one he has just taken with Duane.
Defending his brother when Mark wants to shoot him, Dean tells the others to go with the explosives they have made, and take the weapons they have. He will remain behind with Sam. As they argue, Sam trying to get Dean to leave him, Dean refusing, the doctor comes back and tells them that everyone has mysteriously vanished. At a loss, but with Sam's blood --- and now, the samples from everyone else's who was tested --- clear, the boys realise they may have to chalk this one up as a mystery and move on. Meanwhile, down the road Duane asks Mark to stop: he has a call to make. Just like Meg in season one, he slits Mark's throat and reports back that “the experiment was a success. The Winchester boy immune, as we expected.” Then he nods grimly, his eyes turning that shade of black that denote a demon is in occupation:”Nothing left behind.”
On their way out of town, the boys discuss what Dean had been saying earlier, about being tired of the quest, wanting to give it up. He had it seems been prepared to die with Sam, if Sam were possessed. Now Sam asks him what he was talking about, and after some evasion Dean says that before he died, their father made him promise something; he told Dean something about Sam, but we're not told what. At least, not yet.
PCRs
Once again Dean uses the names of some of his rock heroes as covers. When he presents their ID as US Marshalls, he calls himself “Billy Gibbons” and Sam “Frank Beard”. Of ZZ Top, of course.
Dean remarks to Sam “A little too Stepford”. That references the movie “The Stepford Wives”, about a creepy suburb where the women have been replaced by robots.
Mark mentions one of his neighbours is, or was, Mr. Rogers. Dean smiles despite himself. Mr Rogers is the presenter of a well-known and loved children's show in the US. Apparently.
Dean says he feels like Chuck Heston in the Omega Man. That references a seventies sci-fi movie in which Charlton Heston wanders the Earth as the last man alive after an apocalypse.
Unsurprisingly, Dean also references the movie “Night of the living dead”, cult zombie horror movie.
Dean worries that Duane Turner might “Hulk out”, referring to the transformation of Dr Bruce Banner into the green-skinned Incredible Hulk from Marvel comics.
Sidewinder, a town forty miles away, is also in “The Shining”, and is also forty miles away from the hotel in that movie.
Dean also fantasises about getting to bed Lindsay Lohan, famous A-List celebrity, film star and
enfant terrible for a while,
WISEGUY
When asked to get out of the car at the roadblock by one of the guys, Dean shakes his head. “You are a handsome devil” he admits, “but I don't swing that way, sorry.” (Whether the devil here is meant to be taken literally I don't know, but knowing Dean, probably.)
BROTHERS
Dean is completely shocked when Sam is infected. He literally doesn't know what to do, so he falls back on his old instincts, instincts honed during years on the road, and protects him. He knows that his brother will turn, that he may in fact have to kill him, but he'll be damned if he'll let someone else do it. Dean mentions here as they wait to see if Sam will turn that he is tired of being on the road, tired of the mission, tired of not being able to just kick back and have some fun. He wants to go to the Grand Canyon, or Hollywood. He wants to try to get laid, preferably with Lindsey Lohan. He seems somewhat broken, and it's pretty obvious that without his brother he will be unable to carry on the quest alone. If Sam dies --- if he has to kill him --- then it's almost certain that Dean will take his own life shortly afterwards.
Dean then reveals that he is carrying an extra burden, as if that of being alive only at the expense of his father's life isn't enough of a weight to have around your neck: he tells Sam that he made a promise to their dad, just before John died, but he can't or won't tell Sam what that was. But as it comes in almost answer to Sam's request that he be allowed to share some of Dean's burden, it would seem likely that John asked Dean to be the strong one, to carry everything and not allow Sam to labour under the same weight. An odd, perhaps cruel thing for a parent to ask of one of their children, but as ever, surely the Winchester patriarch has his reasons?
Dean berates Sam for letting Jake Turner get away, but he knows in his heart that his younger brother would find it hard, maybe impossible to shoot a young boy in the back, even if he is possessed. He can sympathise with this but were it him he believes he would have shot the kid. Nevertheless, when it comes time for him to shoot Duane, he can't do it. Then again, he is able to shoot Mrs Turner, perhaps because there is incontrovertible evidence that she is no longer human. Let's not forget though that someone possessed is still human inside, and if the demon can be exorcised they will or may return to normal, as we've seen a few times now, most notably with Meg. Why didn't they attempt this with Mrs Turner instead of just shooting her?
I suppose an exorcism takes a long time and a lot of effort, and of course you have to tie up the possessed person --- and I think you may need a Devil's Trap too? --- and they could hardly do that with everyone in that situation but still, makes you think. Sam tells Dean that he's far too eager to kill a man who could be innocent when he goes to shoot Duane, and although Dean baulks at the last, Sam accuses him of being “just like one of those creatures.” We've seen this is Dean before: his years on the road, the things he's seen, now coupled with his cheating of death and the loss of their father, all have pushed him towards a much darker place, a place where there is little room for pity, sympathy or doubt. A place where the world becomes black and white, us against them, no grey areas. A world like that inhabited by the hunter from “Bloodlust”. Is Dean becoming like him?
The ARC of the matter
This surely must be an important one. Although generally it plays like Zombies VS Demons or something, the ending is telling. First, we reference back to Meg (or rather, the demon possessing her at the time) making her “phone call” in season one, when she slit the throat of a truck driver, caught his blood in a bowl and used it to contact her demon master/father. This was shocking at the time because it came as so unexpected, and second time around, when Duane does it, it's doubly so. Duane has only been in the episode kind of peripherally, even given the fact that it's the vision of his being about to be shot by Dean that brings the boys to Rivergrove, and he seems to be an innocent who came close to getting shot. In reality, it appears that he is now possessed, so you have to wonder had Dean shot him would Duane have died? Would the demon have left his body, or would it have used its power to keep him alive until it had delivered its message?
That of course raises another possibility, that the vision was planted in Sam's head by the demon, or a demon, in order to draw him here so he could be subjected to the experiment, to see if he was immune to the virus. Either way, it comes as a shocker, especially since the episode seems to be winding down without giving us any answers. It's quite low-key for an episode of “Supernatural”.
But more than that, it shows signs that there is a definite plan here, a plan perhaps to turn ordinary people into demons through viral infection carried by demonic blood. It seems, too, that this may have been what happened to the colony in Roanoake in the sixteenth century, though where those people, and the inhabitants of Rivergrove, have gone now is another mystery. This seems to have been a trial, a test, and yet if they already did this in the 1500s why the need to repeat the experiment? Maybe it didn't work properly the last time. Or maybe, as I've speculated, this time it was carried out for the express purpose of confirming Sam's immunity, though you would also ask why this is important?And where did the word Croatoan come from? Who scratched it into the post? The demon who bears that name? Someone who recognised it for what it was? Or does the word refer to something else, a sign that the experiment is over? Or in play?
Either way, it would seem that this is another sign that the demon, or demons, is or are gathering its or their forces for the big conflict to come. If humans can be infected and possessed this easily, it doesn't bode well for Sam and Dean's attempts to defeat the demon and its allies.